Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

  They were dancing in his brain, too, as well as on the tabletop and he saw them, or sensed them, or was aware of them, as if they were a part of him. Aware of the sides that had the six black dots and the sides with one and all the other sides.

  But they were slippery to handle, hard to make go the way he wanted them to go and for a fearful, agonizing second it seemed almost as if the spinning cubes had minds and personalities that were their very own.

  One of them was a six and the other still was rolling. The six was coming up and it toppled for a moment, threatening to fall back.

  A push, thought Sutton. Just a little push. But with brain power instead of finger power.

  The six came up and the two dice lay there, both of them showing sixes.

  Sutton drew in a sobbing breath and his heart beat once again and the blood pumped through the veins.

  They stood in silence for a moment, staring at one another across the tabletop.

  Adams spoke and his voice was quiet and one could not have guessed from any tone he used what he might have felt.

  "The visor is over there," he said.

  Sutton bowed, ever so slightly, and he felt foolish doing it, like a character out of some incredibly old and bad piece of romantic fiction.

  "Destiny," he said, "still is working for me. When it comes to the pinch, destiny is there."

  "Your hour will start," said Adams, "as soon as you finish talking."

  He turned smartly and walked back to the patio, very stiff and straight.

  Now that he had won, Sutton suddenly was weak, and he walked to the visor on legs that seemed to have turned to rubber.

  He sat down before the visor and took out the directory that he needed.

  INFormation. And the subheading.

  Geography, historic, North America.

  He found the number and dialed it and the glass lit up.

  The robot said: "Can I be of service, sir?"

  "Yes," said Sutton, "I would like to know where Wisconsin was."

  "Where are you now, sir?"

  "I am at the residence of Mr. Christopher Adams."

  "The Mr. Adams who is with the Department of Galactic Investigation?"

  "The same," said Sutton.

  "Then," the robot said, "you are in Wisconsin."

  "Bridgeport?" asked Sutton.

  "It was on the Wisconsin River, on the north bank, a matter of seven miles above the junction with the Mississippi."

  "But those rivers? I've never heard of them."

  "You are near them now, sir. The Wisconsin flows into the Mississippi just below the point where you are now."

  Sutton rose shakily and crossed the room, went out on the patio.

  Adams was lighting up his pipe.

  "You got what you wanted?" he asked.

  Sutton nodded.

  "Get going, then," said Adams. "Your hour's already started."

  Sutton hesitated.

  "What is it, Ash?"

  "I wonder," said Sutton, "I wonder if you would shake my hand."

  "Why, sure," said Adams.

  He rose ponderously to his feet and held out his hand.

  "I don't know which," said Adams, "but you are either the greatest man or the biggest damn fool that I have ever known."

  XXXIII

  BRIDGEPORT dreamed in its rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river. The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a fierceness that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything…out of the weather-beaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of the leaf-wilted shrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers.

  The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again, and for the short span of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife. Between the tracks and river the railroad station drowsed, a foursquare building that had the look of having hunched its shoulders against summer sun and winter cold for so many years that it stood despondent and cringing, waiting for the next whiplash of weather or of fate.

  Sutton stood on the station platform and listened to the river, the suck and swish of tiny whirlpools that ran along the shore, the gurgle of water flowing across a hidden, upward-canted log, the soft sigh of watery fingers grasping at the tip of a downward-drooping branch. And above it all, cutting through it all, the real noise of the river…the tongue that went talking down the land, the sound made of many other sounds, the deep muted roar that told of power and purpose.

  He lifted his head and squinted against the sun to follow the mighty metal span that leaped across the river from the bluff-top, slanting down toward the high-graded road-bed that walked across the gently rising valley on the other shore.

  Man leaped rivers on great spans of steel and he never heard the talk of rivers as they rolled down to the sea. Man leaped seas on wings powered by smooth, sleek engines and the thunder of the sea was a sound lost in the empty vault of sky. Man crossed space in metallic cylinders that twisted time and space and hurled Man and his miraculous machines down alleys of conjectural mathematics that were not even dreamed of in this world of Bridgeport, 1977.

  Man was in a hurry and he went too far, too fast. So far and fast that he missed many things…things that he should have taken time to learn as he went along…things that someday in some future age he would take the time to study. Someday Man would come back along the trail again and learn the things he'd missed and wonder why he missed them and think upon the years that were lost for never knowing them.

  Sutton stepped down from the platform and found a faint footpath that went down to the river. Carefully, he made his way along it, for it was soft and crumbly and there were stones that one must be careful not to step upon, since they might turn beneath one's foot.

  At the end of the footpath he found the old man.

  The oldster sat perched on a small boulder planted in the mud and he held a cane pole slanted river-wise across his knees. An odoriferous pipe protruded from a two-weeks growth of graying whiskers and an earthenware jug with a corncob for a cork sat beside him, easy to his hand.

  Sutton sat down cautiously on the shelving shore beside the boulder and wondered at the coolness of the shade from the trees and undergrowth—a welcome coolness after the fierce splash of sun upon the village just a few rods up the bank.

  "Catching anything?" he asked.

  "Nope," said the old man.

  He puffed away at his pipe and Sutton watched in fascinated silence. One would have sworn, he told himself, that the mop of whiskers was on fire.

  "Didn't catch nothing yesterday, either," the old man told him.

  He took his pipe out of his mouth with a deliberate, considered motion and spat with studied concentration into the center of a river eddy.

  "Didn't catch nothing the day before yesterday," he volunteered.

  "You want to catch something, don't you?" Sutton asked.

  "Nope," said the old geezer.

  He put down a hand and lifted the jug, worked out the corncob cork and wiped the jug's neck carefully with a dirty hand.

  "Have a snort," he invited, holding out the jug.

  Sutton, remembering the dirty hand, took it, gagging silently. Cautiously, he lifted it and tipped it to his mouth.

  The stuff splashed into his mouth and gurgled down his throat and it was liquid fire laced with gall and with a touch of brimstone to give it something extra.

  Sutton snatched the jug away and held it by the handle, keeping his mouth wide open to cool it and air out the taste.

  The old man took it back and Sutton swabbed at the tears running down his cheeks.

  "Ain't aged the way she should be," the old man apologized. "But I ain't got the time to fool around with that."

  He took himself a hooker, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and whooshed out his breath in gusty satisfaction. A butterfly, fluttering past
, dropped stone-dead.

  The old man put out a foot and pushed at the butterfly.

  "Feeble thing," he said.

  He put the jug down again and worked the cork in tight.

  "Stranger, ain't you?" he asked Sutton. "Don't recall seeing you around."

  Sutton nodded. "Looking for some people by the name of Sutton. John H. Sutton."

  The old man chuckled. "Old John, eh? Him and me was kids together. Sneakiest little rascal that I ever knew. Ain't worth a tinker's damn, old John ain't. Went off to law school and got him an education. But he didn't make a go of it. Roosting out on a farm up on the ridge, over there across the river."

  He shot a look at Sutton. "You ain't no relative of his, are you?"

  "Well," said Sutton, "not exactly. Not very close, at least."

  "Tomorrow's the Fourth," said the old man, "and I recollect the time that John and me blew up a culvert in Campbell Hollow, come the Fourth. Found some dynamite a road gang had been using for blasting. John and me, we figured it would make a bigger bang if we confined it, sort of. So we put her in the culvert pipe and lit a long fuse. Mister, it blew that culvert all to hell. I recollect our dads like to took the hide off us for doing it."

  Dead ringer, thought Sutton. John H. Sutton is just across the river and tomorrow is the Fourth. July 4, 1977, that's what the letter said.

  And I didn't have to ask. The old codger up and told me.

  The sun was a furnace blast from the river's surface, but here, underneath the trees, one just caught the edge of the flare of heat. A leaf floated by and there was a grasshopper riding on it. The grasshopper tried to jump ashore, but his jump fell short and the current grabbed him and swallowed him and took him out of sight.

  "Never had a chance," said the old man, "that hopper didn't. Wickedest river in these United States, the old Wisconsin is. Can't trust her. Tried to run steamboats on her in the early days, but they couldn't do it, for where there was a channel one day there'd be a sand bar on the next. Current shifts the sand something awful. Government fellow wrote a report on her once. Said the only way you could use the Wisconsin for navigation was to lathe and plaster it."

  From far overhead came the rumble of traffic crossing the bridge. A train came by, chuffing and grinding, a long freight that dragged itself up the valley. Long after it had passed, Sutton heard its whistle hooting like a lost voice for some unseen crossing.

  "Destiny," said the old man, "sure wasn't working worth a hoot for that hopper, was it?"

  Sutton sat bolt upright, stammering. "What was that you said?"

  "Don't mind me," the old man told him. "I go around mumbling to myself. Sometimes people hear me and think that I'm crazy."

  "But destiny? You said something about destiny."

  "Interested in it, lad," said the old man. "Wrote a story about it once. Didn't amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days."

  Sutton relaxed and lay back.

  A dragonfly skimmed the water's surface. Far up the bank, a small fish jumped and left a widening circle in the water.

  "About this fishing," said Sutton. "You don't seem to care whether you catch anything or not."

  "Rather not," the old man told him. "Catch something and you got to take it off the hook. Then you got to bait up again and throw the hook back in the river. Then you got to clean the fish. It's an awful sight of work."

  He took the pipe out of his mouth and spat carefully into the river.

  "Ever read Thoreau, son?"

  Sutton shook his head, trying to remember. The name struck a chord of memory. There had been a fragment in a book of ancient literature in his college days. All that was left of what was believed to have been an extensive piece of writing.

  "You ought to," the old man told him. "He had the right idea, Thoreau did."

  Sutton rose and dusted off his trousers.

  "Stick around," the old man said. "You ain't bothering me. Hardly at all."

  "Got to be getting along," said Sutton.

  "Hunt me up some other time," the old man said. "We could talk some more. My name is Cliff, but they call me Old Cliff now. Just ask for Old Cliff. Everybody knows me."

  "Someday," Sutton said politely, "I'll do just that."

  "Care for another snort before you go?"

  "No, thank you," said Sutton, backing off. "No, thank you very much."

  "Oh, well," the old man said. He lifted the jug and took a long and gurgling drink. He lowered the jug and whooshed out his breath, but it was not so spectacular this time. There was no butterfly.

  Sutton climbed the bank to the blaze of sun again.

  "Sure," said the station agent, "the Suttons live just across the river, over in Grant County. Several ways to get there. Which one would you like?"

  "The longest one," Sutton told him. "I'm not in any hurry."

  The moon was coming up when Sutton climbed the hill to reach the bridge.

  He was in no hurry, for he had all night.

  XXXIV

  THE LAND was wild…wilder than anything Sutton had ever seen on the lawn-mowered, trimmed and watered parks of his native Earth. The land tilted upward, as if it rested on a knife edge, and it was littered by great clumps of stone which appeared to have been flung down in godlike anger by a giant hand out of forgotten time. Stark bluffs speared upward, soaring massively, masked by mighty trees that seemed to have strived, at one time, to match the height and dignity of the rocky cliffs. But now they stood defeated, content to be less than the very cliffs, but with a certain dignity and patience learned, no doubt, through their ancient striving.

  Summer flowers huddled in the spaces between the strewn rocks or clung close to the mossy root-mounds of the larger trees. A squirrel sat on a limb somewhere and chattered half in anger, half in rapture at the rising sun.

  Sutton toiled upward, following the rock-filled ravine from the river road. At times he walked, but more often he went on hands and knees, clawing his way up the slope.

  He stopped often and stood with heels dug in and back resting against a tree, wiping the perspiration from his dripping face. In the valley below, the river that had seemed roiled and muddy as he walked along it on the road had assumed a blueness that challenged the very blueness of the sky which it reflected. And the air was crystal clear above it, clearer than air had ever seemed before. A hawk dived down across the gulf of space between the blueness of the sky and the blueness of the river and it seemed to Sutton that he could see each separate feather in the folded wings.

  Once, through the trees, he glimpsed the break in the cliffs ahead and knew that he was at the place that old John Sutton had mentioned in his letter.

  The sun was only a couple of hours high and there still was time. There still would be time, for John Sutton had talked to the man only a couple of hours or so and then had gone to dinner.

  From there on, with the cleft of the cliff in sight, Sutton took his time. He reached the top and found the boulder that his old ancestor had spoken of and it was appropriate for sitting.

  He sat upon it and stared across the valley and was grateful for the shade.

  And there was peace, as John Sutton had said there was. Peace and the quieting majesty of the scene before him…the strange third-dimensional quality of the space that hung, as if alive, above the river valley. Strangeness, too, the strangeness of expected…and unexpected…happenings.

  He looked at his watch and it was half past nine, so he left the boulder and lay down behind a patch of brush and waited. Almost as he did, there was a soft, smooth swish of motor-noise and a ship came down, a tiny one-man ship, slanting across the trees, to land in the pasture just beyond the fence.

  A man got out and leaned against the ship, staring at the sky and trees, as if he were satisfying himself that he had reached his destination.

  Sutton chuckled quietly to himself.

  Stage setting, he said. Dropping in unexpectedly and with a crippled ship…no need to explain your presence. Waitin
g for a man to come walking up and talk to you. Most natural thing in all the world. You didn't seek him out, he saw you and came to you and of course he talked.

  You couldn't come walking up the road and turn in at the gate and knock at the door and say:

  "I came to pick up all the scandal and the dirt I can about the Sutton family. I wonder if I might sit down and talk with you."

  But you could land in a pasture with a crippled ship and first you'd talk of corn and pasture, of weather and of grass, and finally you'd get around to talking about personal and family matters.

  The man had gotten out his wrench now and was tinkering at the ship.

  It must almost be time.

  Sutton lifted himself on his arms and stared through the close-laced branches of the hazel brush.

  John H. Sutton was coming down the hill, a big-bellied man with a trim white beard and an old black hat, and his walk was a waddle with some swagger in it.

  XXXV

  SO THIS is failure, Eva Armour thought. This is how failure feels. Dry in the throat and heavy in the heart and tiredness in the brain.

  I am bitter, she told herself, and I have a right to be. Although I am so tired with trying and with failure that the knife edge of bitterness is dulled.

  "The psych-tracer in Adams' office has stopped," Herkimer had said and then the plate had gone dead as he cut the visor.

  There was no trace of Sutton and the tracer had gone dead.

  That meant that Sutton was dead and he could not be dead, for historically he had written a book and as yet he had not written it.

  Although history was something that you couldn't trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more logical and more acceptable than truth.

  Half the history of Sutton, Eva knew, must be purely apocryphal. And yet there were certain truths that must be truths indeed.

  Someone had written a book and it would have had to be Sutton, for no one else could break the language in which his notes were written and the words themselves breathed the very sincerity of the man himself.